Venezuelans Now Regret Giving Up Their Guns – This is What Happens to a Disarmed Populace

In 2012, Venezuela’s dictator-for-life President Hugo Chavez had his rubber stamp legislature pass the Control of Arms, Munitions and Disarmament Law. The public generally supported it at the time. The law stripped law-abiding Venezuelans of every firearm and round of ammunition they could legally own.

“Guns would have served as a vital pillar to remaining a free people, or at least able to put up a fight,” Javier Vanegas, 28, a Venezuelan teacher of English now exiled in Ecuador, told Fox News. “The government security forces, at the beginning of this debacle, knew they had no real opposition to their force. Once things were this bad, it was a clear declaration of war against an unarmed population.”

If only the citizens of Venezuela had the right to keep and bear arms as a check against government tyranny.

Once again, another nation demonstrates what can and frequently does happen to a disarmed populace. The despotism pushed by the authoritarian ruling class can proceed full force, with no realistic threat of opposition from the people they subjugate.

“Venezuela shows the deadly peril when citizens are deprived of the means of resisting the depredations of a criminal government,” said David Kopel, a policy analyst, and research director at the Independence Institute and adjunct professor of Advanced Constitutional Law at Denver University. “The Venezuelan rulers – like their Cuban masters – apparently viewed citizen possession of arms as a potential danger to a permanent communist monopoly of power.”

Kopel has that right. This is exactly what my family went through in Cuba.

This is a photo of my Tío Mario. He fled Cuba shortly after Hugo Chavez’s role model, Fidel Castro, took power in 1959. Tío was hired by The Company when he arrived in the US and was a member of Brigada 2506. Yeah, that company, the folks that set up the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Sadly, the invasion was a failure and Castro and his ilk are still in power, oppressing Cuba’s disarmed populace, to this day.

Lucky for us, my family settled here in the US. One of the most important lessons my Tío ever thought me was that a free people are armed and that I am to NEVER SURRENDER MY GUNS under any circumstance. But Venezuelans sure did and now they’re seeing the consequences of their actions.

“Venezuelans didn’t care enough about it. The idea of having the means to protect your home was seen as only needed out in the fields. People never would have believed they needed to defend themselves against the government,” Vanegas explained. “Venezuelans evolved to always hope that our government would be non-tyrannical, non-violator of human rights, and would always have a good enough control of criminality.”